Collegiality

Department chairs can play a significant role in promoting collaboration and cooperation for the benefit of individual faculty members and the unit. In an interview with Academic Leader, Patrick Lawrence, chair of the department of geography and planning at the University of Toledo, outlined several practical steps that can help chairs support faculty and build a collegial department.

There is a strong relationship between workplace civility climate and employee attitudes and experiences. Research on workplace incivility has clearly demonstrated that employees and organizations experience detrimental outcomes from experiencing and witnessing such mistreatment.

What atmosphere are you creating at work? Institutional polices form a threshold for promoting access and equity, but it’s up to academic leaders to create an environment in which people feel creative, productive, and engaged—an idea known as inclusive excellence.

Traditionally a person in higher education is hired as an assistant professor. After an agreed-upon number of years, usually six, she or he is either tenured (aka, the Holy Grail of higher education) or terminated. At this time, the person also applies for promotion to the rank of associate professor. Of course, he or she is highly motivated to attain tenure and promotion in rank. This motivation to teach well, produce scholarly research, and have an enviable record of providing service to the department, school, university, and community is logically self-evident: the reward of tenure and promotion. The same reward-incentive system is in place when, after a number of years, this associate professor is rewarded with the rank of full professor. The person is rewarded based on how well she or he meets standards of teaching, scholarship, and service. However, of equal importance to the overall effectiveness of a person’s worth to a department is how she or he interacts with colleagues. If a person is downright nasty, unwilling to collaborate with colleagues, does not do a fair share of the work, and is consistently toxic to students, peers, and staff, should that person be rewarded with tenure and promotion in rank?

You are the chair of a department of six full-time faculty members. You have been chair for three years, are tenured, and hold the rank of full professor. Four of your faculty members are tenured, three hold the rank of associate professor, and one, Dr. Bill Dudas, is a full professor. One faculty member, Dr. Amanda Thompson, is a tenure-track assistant professor in her fourth year at the university. You consider Thompson your most valuable and productive faculty member. She is a master teacher, a great scholar with many databased articles published in highly regarded journals, and on five university committees as well as three key committees in the department. She is project director for a US Department of Education five-year grant to fund students in the department’s master’s degree program.